150-year-old mouse trap snares a fresh victim

The collection of Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) includes a 150-year-old "perpetual mouse trap" that is very accurately named: despite its age, it's still catching mice.

"There appears to be a dead mouse in this mousetrap, which is not described as being there on the database," MERL's assistant curator Oliver Douglas wrote in an email to staff after he discovered the corpse on February 3.

Of all the thousands of items in the Reading-based museum's store, the mouse squeezed inside the one designed to kill it — and, finding itself trapped, soon died.

The mouse trap is a little more complicated than today's: it's "a multi-catch trap with a see-saw mechanism", built from a design patented in 1861. According to a blog post on the museum's website, the trap's label "proudly declares that it 'will last a lifetime'. How apt."

MERL staff aren't sure whether the mouse was a lone agent or a "scout" for a larger family — and nor have they decided what to do with the furry little corpse.

"One option is a dignified burial," they wrote. "Another is to desiccate it or have it prepared to remain as a permanent feature of the mouse trap for our new displays."